Can Britain’s “mission-led” government defy gravity?

The state opening of Parliament is an odd mix of pageantry and wonkery. “My Government’s legislative programme will be mission-led,” declared King Charles III, addressing the red-robed Lords from a gilded throne on July 17th. Sir Keir Starmer promises that “missions” will form the centrepiece of his new government. Whether this approach works will help determine his success in office.

Sir Keir, a technocrat by inclination, was partly inspired by the work of Mariana Mazzucato, an economist and author of “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism”. In it she argues that the space programmes of the 1960s and the covid-19 vaccination effort can provide a model for tackling other complex challenges. By setting audacious goals, using state procurement smartly and giving businesses and researchers the task of coming up with solutions, governments can fix big problems, boost productivity and generate other innovations (just as the moon landings led to baby formula and foil blankets). That, at least, is the theory.

A space-age nomenclature for the new government is already emerging. There will be five “missions”, each with quantifiable targets and each overseen by a mission “delivery board”, which will feature outside experts and be chaired by the prime minister. The “mission delivery unit”, a unit in the Cabinet Office overseen by Pat McFadden, the chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, will monitor progress. To take the example of energy, where thinking seems to be most advanced, the goal is to fully decarbonise electricity generation by 2030. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is designated the energy “mission lead”. Within his department, Chris Stark, a former head of the Climate Change Committee, a watchdog, will lead a unit called “mission control”.

Although Ms Mazzucato’s book is a manifesto for interventionist government, Sir Keir insists he is “unburdened by doctrine”. He portrays missions as a straightforward administrative fix for a dysfunctional British state. One critique is that government is short-termist: Mr McFadden likens the missions to propellers, without which a ship of state is blown about. Politicians underprice the value of civil servants having a clear picture of their government’s objectives, says Helen MacNamara, a former deputy cabinet secretary. “If you can articulate the point of your government in a way that the vast majority of the public servants working for you can understand and translate into their daily activity, you will achieve so much more.”

Another critique is that Whitehall is blighted by silos. Energy firms that want to deploy new infrastructure complain of being passed between departments, local governments, the energy regulator and the grid operator. Mr Stark will act as their hotline, with the power to troubleshoot problems and speed things up on a project-by-project basis. (His role has been informed by that of Kate Bingham, who led Britain’s successful covid-vaccine drive and who was well-known to pharmaceutical suppliers.) There are already glimmers of cross-departmental co-operation. Wes Streeting, the health secretary, and David Lammy, the foreign secretary, both talk up their departments as serving the government’s highest-priority mission: elevating growth to be the fastest in the G7.

There will be an emphasis on galvanising contributions from business, academia and wider society; in his address the king announced a bill to give greater powers to England’s regional mayors. The government will place new stress on policy experimentation. “You’re not going to drive change through the traditional method of writing a white paper, throwing it over a wall, and hoping something happens,” Mr McFadden told a conference on July 9th. (There will also be torrents of jargon about “delivery” and “driving change”.)

But a missions-led approach will have to surmount some big hurdles. It is debatable whether the covid-vaccine programme, in which the state’s vast resources were directed at a single, urgent task, is a good model for the continuous daily work of government. Some of the five missions—“build an NHS fit for the future”; “break down barriers to opportunity”—are very fuzzy. And the goal of driving the highest productivity growth in the G7 should, Ms Mazzucato argues in a paper published on July 15th, be a by-product of a mission rather than its goal.

The availability and allocation of money also matter. Ms Mazzucato’s vision implies increased state investment (which she argues would lead to productivity gains). “It’s not about being profligate, but it doesn’t make any sense to say ‘we’d love to do this stuff, but we’re going to have to wait until we get growth,’” she says. Whitehall departments are siloed in part because that is how their spending is set. A radical option would be to give the missions their own budgets, which would compel departments to collaborate for funding, suggests Alex Thomas of the Institute for Government, a think-tank.

Britain’s adversarial political culture may also be unsuited to the experimentation, collaboration and transparency implied by the missions. Indeed, Sir Keir himself owes his new job to a command-and-control approach to leadership marked by a low tolerance for dissent or errors. The risk, say some insiders, is that mission-led government ends up as the rearranging of internal government committees rather than a radically new relationship between the state and private sector. Still, Sir Keir has made this a priority. That alone means it is worth taking seriously. ■

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